The Art Of Amy Zerner

Amy Zerner takes us on a journey of transformation to arrive at "Paradise Found", a place of transcendence. She envisions it as a meditative space, a garden of serenity and beauty with a celestial peak rising to touch its star of fulfillment, as she beckons us to reach toward further heights and insights.

Amy Zerner is keeper of the garden of Paradise Found, with its rich patches of embroidered, painted, printed trees, leaves flowers, birds, butterflies — stitched appliqué, layer on layer, a fabric collage dense with invention, fantasy and inspiration. In the center, the mountain rises in the violet air to a sky of stars set in their patterned print. At the foot, in the earth and its river, the snake of wisdom undulates in its narrow stream of blue silk brocade.

Amy's work, ancient as well as modern in its cross-cultural sweep, is ultimately a sacred art. Each work, amazing in its detail, needs to be carefully studied, appreciated in the bits and pieces by which it is made, to truly absorb the power of the entire composition. Her image emerges out of the build-up and, in the end, reveals a picture that is powerfully evocative of dreams, memories, stories, and longings.

There is an ancient Persian belief that the creation of art endows the maker with divine powers that are transmitted to the viewer. It is art, Andre Malraux wrote, "...that imposes the presence in the Jewish symbols of the holy Torah and the liturgical art of the Church, as well as in the patterns of prayer rugs and prayer shawls of India, the meditative Thankas of Tibet. Amy's collages, both in paper and in fabric, now number over 500 works made over the last twenty years. Like the medieval alchemist turning lead into gold, she turns base materials into the gold of art, transcendence, and, ultimately, self-illumination.

Her alchemical "laboratory" is her studio. It is filled with fabric, beads, and an assortment of decorative paraphernalia of every kind, from every place and every decade in the last one hundred years: prints, silks, velvets, laces, sequins, metallic threads. They come to her as she searches flea markets and antique shop wherever she goes, and they somehow appear at her door, by way of both friends and unknown admirers.

Amy's way of working is as intuitive and mysterious as her end product, the densely assembled and collaged "illuminated tapestries". Her "Paradise Found" is composed of landscapes, sacred spaces, temples, tabernacles, and grottos for spirits, goddesses, and the Vision Quest of self-realization.

Cutting, sewing, balancing, placing and replacing, the also paints, dyes, and colors directly, using whatever technique works at the time. In Amy Zerner's collage process, the image is found in the process, built up by bits and pieces, ribbons and shreds. The metamorphosis goes from risk to revelation, from rag to realization.

"More things in Heaven and Earth than dreams are made of" inhabit the tapestries, scrolls, banners of Amy Zerner. Her unworldly visions of other worlds — images juxtaposed to contrast, polarize, confuse, clarify, and ultimately, create balance and harmony — come to life in her art. From her fabric collages, often structured on the grid, a key centering image emerges miraculously out of the layering of multiple and varied textile fragments, which include machine-made synthetics as well as rare Victorian trimmings and fines old silks. She uses direct painting and dyeing, color Xeroxes and enamels, as well as embroidery, appliqué and beading.

Instead of being a mere background for painting — as in the work of Matisse — Amy's textiles are themselves the "painting", both as content and as composition, a dense layering of myriad pieces, like a thick impasto of multicolored strokes building the vision.

Amy Zerner's roots as an artist are founded in modernism — most notably through Matisse — and abstract expressionism with its driving energies of improvisation and spontaneity. Her influences also come from surprising sources of subculture, such as "outsider art", which includes folk art, ethnic and primitive art, child art, "l'art brut", the art of the insane, and religious art with its startling visionary strength, such as that of Russian religious icons. Her inspiration comes also from works of ancient times; there is the presence of Byzantine mosaics, Coptic weavings, and the prehistoric art of the caves at Lascaux.

Like Picasso, she does not hesitate to use anything she needs from any artist and any culture or nonculture, encompassing the range from "low" to "high". As an artist, she knows she lives at a time when the culture knows more about itself than ever before. She uses all the knowledge of the past and present that serves her purpose.

Amy's early works reflect her interest in fairy tales and mythology as well as her natural gift of using fantasy to provide clues to self-knowledge and transformation. She studied painting in art school at Pratt Institute, and later fell in love with textiles, when she created a patchwork quilt on a job for Tony Walton, the Broadway set designer. It was then that she began her journey from being a painter and printmaker to becoming a fabric collagist. She began a tradition of her own, a unique, new art form.

She is, indeed, a one-woman movement, engaged in the quest of a lifetime. This is her focus, her obsession, her life work. Her tapestries, dense and layered, reflect her development as an artist. She has become increasingly captivated by astrology, by the power of the stars, the sun, the moon, and the planets over our lives. While her early works include symbolic representations of the planets, they also speak of her own life, dreams, and ideas.

Neptune, done in 1976, bears a striking resemblance to Amy's 1975 drawing of Monte, her husband-to-be and now her collaborator. Her portrait of Monte, whom she had met the previous year, is a sensitive study in pastel, colored pencils, and watercolor, and reveals her skills as a draftsman and colorist.

In Pluto, also 1976, a woman looks into the self-reflection pool of the underworld or the unconscious. Like Neptune, the piece is largely done in paint and batik, with outlines and sewn black yarn hair. The surreal, the symbolic, the power of the dream as it finds its resonance in conscious reality were among the themes Amy Zerner touches on as she compulsively and intuitively made this large, four-by-six, hanging. At this stage, she was only 25 years old.

Both Neptune and Pluto show the increasing complexity of her technical skills: a combination of printing techniques including batik with painting, drawing, collage elements, and the use of borders.

These techniques further animate the openly flamboyant Wishstar of 1977. A nude goddess rises from the flames, her hand upraised to the phoenix, signifying her power of transformation. Amy's liberal use of collage birds as rising aerial spirits and reflective materials of sequins, beads, and borders further enrich the spiritual and aesthetic powers of this early work. At this time, Amy realized she would need a wide array of materials to do what she wanted to do. It was then that she began seriously to hunt for them.

She did her early fabric work on large muslin sheets and used any supplies she happened to have in her house. She did not have a sewing machine at the time and, although occasionally she was able to borrow one, she frequently did her stitching by hand.

In The Rainforest, done in the same year of 1977, the grid becomes her structure for defining her elements. She begins to use independent units of fabric sewn into a work that is both symbolic and narrative. By 1982, with Witchessence, she was creating a fabric collage that also incorporated printing and dyeing, batik, and Xerox, hand-appliquéd shapes and machine-stitched borders.

Witchessence is part of a series showing the cardinal points of a woman — as virgin, mother, amazon/witch, sage. It shows the face of a woman at its center, her body and the landscape as one, deer as symbols of shamanistic energy. It is a reflection of Amy's own development as an artist, as a woman, and as a deeply spiritual sensibility searching for her own evolution to the position of sage. The sage is also manifest in The Hermit of 1989, one of the seventy-eight tapestries from "The Enchanted Tarot". The Hermit is both master and teacher while still always learning. He has come a long way from the first card, The Fool, who knows little, and is able to make the mistakes of the young and laugh. Amy, at this stage of her growth, has achieved mastery at the fabric collage with each one of the seventy-eight hangings ultimately pictured on the front of each card, an astonishing feat of stitchery and assemblage.

The year 1989 continued to be rich and productive for Amy, one during which she develop her images for The Alchemist (St. Martin's Press, 1991), produced in collaboration with Monte. It is in creating these works that she developed her technique of making paper collages by laser transferred fabric segments. This technique allows her to work more rapidly and with greater variety.

In Transference of Hope, 1989, the central figure is surrounded by a grid of infinite variety in design, detail, direction, texture. The message is that of the teacher who transmits in many ways other than in words. The word "transfer" has a double meaning here as it also does in Transference of Power (also done in 1989). In the transfer process, an array of fabrics is reproduced on paper through laser transfer. The laser copy gives the appearance of real materials. It has freed the artist to go further in her explorations by enabling her to shift, juxtapose, and place the laser printed papers with greater ease. The Transference of Power shows the man and woman rooted together as they stand in the center of a transforming environment, as they seek spiritual power for themselves and each other.

In a gigantic visual and tactile leap, the hanging becomes a masterpiece of visual enrichment, enigma and meanings in process. The work has the quality of changing before our eyes, with the viewer always at the beginning of seeing, never tiring of looking, of becoming lost in it, of finding himself and being found. It speaks directly of Amy Zerner's arrival at the portal of the Mystery School only to face the final wisdom of accepting the mystery.

By the time Amy and Monte came to create their Goddess Guide Me divination system and the twelve goddesses, she was ready for the challenge. Each hanging represented an attribute necessary in the journey toward an evolving and transforming self, as well as one with the power to guide and heal. Her authority over fabric collage was unsurpassed, as the fantastic garments of the goddesses testify, and her authenticity as an artist of spiritual powers is clearly and profoundly demonstrated.

In Romi Kumu, the goddess of willpower, Amy Zerner creates a composite divine force — a combination of classical Greek, ancient Aztec, Hindu, and Egyptian deities — and a strong element of self portraiture. Romi Kumu, a quintessential Amy Zerner creation, is a visual mixture every culture past and present, and a rich view of what it means to be an artist — angel and goddess, dreamer and sage.

This work suggests the kind of place that is set-aside in certain primitive societies for the making of ritual images. These images are also of our own time and place. They express the anxieties of a society in which the role of art is increasingly problematical. These figures also remind us of the commanding, totemic presence of the sculpture and other works of art that have survived from ancient times.

Amy Zerner's art is the art of radiance and transcendence. It is the odyssey of the fragment as it journeys to infinity. What is truly surprising in her art is that it has the same power to influence us as it has to affect the artist herself. While all art has the power to light they way toward a new enrichment of self, Amy's work provides us the tools to reach the light within ourselves, to give power to our lives and clarity to our decisions.

Although Amy may begin a work with the spark of an idea, more often the works reveal themselves only after they are completed. Animals, fish, winged creatures, plants, water, mountains, sky are all used symbolically. Water may be a pool of emotion; Air, the realm of idea; Earth, the physical life; Birds and insects may signify spirit.

The tapestry Immortal Love, done in 1987 and made to communicate love's power, pictures the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum built by the great Shah Jahan as a monument to his eternal love for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Amy's tapestry began in a flea market find of an embroidered picture of the monument in silver thread. Placed in the center of the diamond shape, symbol of the mystic essence of the universe, Immortal Love features a lace waterfall of love that proceeds toward the male and female figures at its base, with ribbons and threads symbolizing the linkage of the elements. Altogether it is an astonishing coming together of shreds and threads.

The multiplicity of bits and pieces that Amy uses are from every corner of the Earth. With all its ancient references, Amy Zerner's art could only have happened today, when it is not unusual for a cotton print from the Ivory Coast to appear at Amy's studio in East Hampton on Long Island, a did the lace bit from England, the silk from India, the beads from Venice, and on and on in the galaxy of Amy's materials.

In Mystery School, 1989, there are over a hundred different fabric pieces and elements. Egyptian deity figures guard either side of the tabernacle, a shrine entrance. Above each figure is a butterfly denoting the hovering spirit. In front of the portal is a lush garden of patches, borders, floral prints, lace, voiles, all flourishing together inside the geometrically balanced spaces. A shining circle of sequins lining the inner apex of the tabernacle encloses the phoenix, its plumes reaching upwards past streaks of clouds. To look closely at this tapestry is to appreciate the velocity and massing of the fragments as they build together to create its awesome impact.

The scene is a cloister dense with secrets, history, legend, prayer, mystery, wisdom — and a symmetry of repetition and contradictions. The door that is closed will open. The bird that flies in all its ascending plumage is still pinned and sewn to its textile Heaven

Amy is like the Native American shaman who goes to the edge of the mountaintop alone to meditate and receive messages and stories from the divine forces. Amy's role is to come back to the tribe and tell us what she has seen and heard. This is her work. She feels she has been chosen. "I myself never had the choice as to what I should do", she says.

When we see Mystery School, study it in its amazing detail, we see the world more intensely afterward, as if we were now able to see under the skin, and beyond the horizon. The work enables us to take in more reality, empowers us to live within its own present, at the same time that it recognizes a particular future and illuminates a particular past.

Mystery School deals with time — present, future, and past — as a unity. The past is always new, always changing with the present in life. Parts that may once have seemed to disappear may emerge again, while others vanish — and then reappear. Yet other parts vanish without a trace as if they had never been.

To watch Amy Zerner begin a new tapestry is to watch her begin a predestined journey to a place she does not yet know. She knows only that the way will discover itself as she moves with it and that it, in turn, will become the road to her own self-discovery. She moves sin an anxiety of possibilities mixed with the free floating impulses of the dreamer in trance — a mixture of chaos and consciousness, confusion and clarity, the dreamer and the dream at one in a state of total awareness, wakefulness, and light.

She begins her complex accretions of fabric with trust in the fragment. She goes to her little trunks or bags or boxes, haphazardly pulling out this little clump of remnants, that wisp of lace, those shreds of metallics and threads. She is performing a ritual act, an incantation, a ceremony that was decided a long time ago, for which she is the medium.

She scatters her pieces in heaps in a ring on the floor. She sits down in the center of it all and waits for the first impulse. The first move will set free the many others that follow. Suddenly she rises and goes like a sleepwalker straight to one of her piles of textile fragments. She picks a piece of iridescent netting, takes up her scissors, and cuts a shape. She has already prepared her "canvas", the rectangular fabric backing with the outer border already sewn in as a frame. She places the first fragment in the middle of the lower portion of the backing. She does not know what she is going to do next, which of the hundreds of fragments or rags she will turn to, separating it from its own little heap of related pieces (not similar scraps, but pieces related through source or time or some other association). It is all decided intuitively, on the spot, layer on layer, as she goes along. She is not aware of any conscious thinking as she moves from one piece of cloth to the next. She is totally in her own world, at one with her obsession, unaware of anything else going on around her.

She spreads each fragment on the backing, putting this one on that one, this next to that, silently for hours. Gradually, miraculously, images begin to emerge. They are as surprising to Amy as to those watching her work. Generally, she is entirely alone during the process of composition, sitting and rising from the floor, pausing, bending to place this patch and that piece, turning and reaching in the midst of her multitude of bags and boxes.

She moves constantly, unaware of anything else around her, gradually building detail. Many of these fragments are old, precious, and costly. She will risk them for the spiritual treasure she pursues. She has no preparatory sketches. She simply recognizes what happens as it is happening, without really knowing how it happened. It is amazing, even to the artist.

Each work emerges the way Robert Frost, in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, described the emergence of a poem: "A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it comes to nothing. It finds its thought and the thought finds the words."

In Vision Quest, 1990, for example, a figure, as if in a trance, stands inside the portal of a sanctuary, within the dynamics of a changing landscape. Her eyes, closed to the outer world, are searching her inner self. Two angels guard the geometrically segmented accumulation of detail and symbol. In her evocation of spiritual forces, the artist layers her images from the center, as if from the soul. All the random events and complexities of life revolve and balance around that sacred center.

Amy is not afraid to explore her unconsciousness as a source of art, inviting its raw energy into the creative process. We feel the power of the pent-up dream as it spills loose into the jungle of the dream, as in Paradiso, made in 1991, a precursor to Paradise Found of 1993. Each tapestry belongs in her series of mystic visions on the journey toward transformation. The eyes of the figure in Vision Quest are closed as she searches for what she cannot see, but can only feel in her trance. She is looking for her own myth and for what she can learn in the course of suffering to find it.

In Paradiso, a golden butterfly, the traditional symbol of the soul's transcendence, emerges from the top of the mountain peak and ascends to the sky, its metamorphosis from egg to larva to cocoon to butterfly signifying transformation. The butterfly, which appears frequently throughout Amy Zerner's work, is a symbol of her conviction that the human soul contains the process of its own ultimate transformation from the very beginning.

Here the dreamer is the artist and the images of her powerful dream state are no more separable from her than the dance from the dancer. Here is a mixture of figures and shapes, symbols and markings, mountain peaks, gardens and rivers, eyes, birds, butterflies, rabbits, snakes, flora and fauna dense and layered, worthy of the jungle of Jung's collective unconscious.

Amy's way of putting things together is to work randomly as well as by careful choice. Her tapestries encompass a multitude of inexplicable combinations calling forth new associations and ancient fears. Extremely personal and private, they demonstrate again the courage of the artist searching for her own way.

In her arrangement of fragments, Amy presents a maze of meanings from which both artist and viewer must extricate themselves. To find her way, Amy first must get lost, and then pick her way through the labyrinth of choices. She mixes combinations of found and natural objects in a cacophony of coloristic particulars — buttons, shells, jewels — to create an object as shrine and icon, ultimately religious, leading to mystery, mystification, and wisdom.

In all her work, Amy has a teammate: Monte Farber, her husband. He, too, is a visionary. He discovered his powers when he met Amy. A musician by instinct and training, he heard, above the inaudible, the music in Amy's landscape. They are an inseparable team.

At one time not too long ago, when they were receiving no encouragement for their work — he as a musician and songwriter, she as a painter and collagist — they experienced a moment of despair. "We looked at each other and we said, 'Let's give this up.' But then we looked at each other again and we said, 'We don't know how to do that'." In their life and their work, visionaries and their vision, they are the same, each one separately and together. How each one experiences the world, how each one makes it new — with a new ear, a new eye, a new hand — alone and together, is the story of Amy and Monte.

When the met in New York City in 1974, Amy had left Pratt Institute where she had studied painting and printmaking, and was working as a prop designer and commercial artist. All that time she was also continuing to pursue her own personal expression. She had begun her study of astrology, which she found rich with the archetypes, symbolism, and mythology that she already knew she needed for her art. Monte, a deeply gifted musician and songwriter who later worked in the film industry, was a committed student of comparative religions and philosophies and was able to help Amy widen the scope of her spiritual and artistic quest. She found inspiration in the Zen teaching of discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.

"My spiritual studies teach me what I know inside already. They help me to realize myself", she says. At the same time, through Amy, Monte became involved in astrology. Together, they used the study of the heavens as an arena for mutual and individual growth.

From the beginning, Monte and Amy found that each had what the other needed — intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. They were married in 1978 and moved out to East Hampton to live in Amy's family home, where she could have her own studio space for the first time. They still live there, with Amy's mother, Jesse, and Amy's 96-year-old Scottish grandmother, Lilias.

Taking inspiration from astrological symbols, Amy began to make her early fabric paintings and prints, heightened with embroidery and other forms of stitchery, and gradually moved more and more into the genre of fabric collage, for which she is internationally recognized today. Monte, while still involved in his music as art, continued to develop, along with Amy, his astrological learning and spiritual disciplines.

Between then and now, an amazing number of things have happened for them. Not only do they enjoy an engrossing marriage, but they are also a productive team, working efficiently together to execute an amazing variety of projects. After twenty years of marriage, the say they do not analyze what takes place between them. "We just know", says Amy, "that we can work anywhere as long as we work together".

Monte says: "Amy and I want to take responsibility for our own states of mind, states of health, the state of our relationship. And what is considered New Age is really old age. Astrology is so ancient, the idea of self-realization is so ancient, Indian and Buddhist religions and their practices are so ancient. I really believe in discipline and practice. It's a discipline because you must practice to maintain a state or a balance. You can't just brush your teeth once. Yoga and mindfulness are the whole idea of meditation — to be aware of our thoughts and states of mind. That is the only way we can really rid ourselves of things that become negative patterns, that fester and hurt us and hurt our psyches".

"I'm always trying to purify and clarify the imagery in my work, and I hope, in turn, the imagery itself communicates this purifying and clearing effect", says Amy. "Monte and I feel we want to apply our art to help heal the Earth, as we are trying to heal ourselves. When I study ancient wisdoms that teach us more about true natures, I get so enthusiastic, and out of this love, some wonderful synchronicity happens. Somebody will come to my door with a bag of fabrics that will have just the right piece that I need at the time, so I kind of learn to let go, knowing that everything will be there at the right time, the materials I need or the images I run across. It is not premeditated. It is pretty spontaneous — I don't sketch out before I start a piece".

Amy collects a "whole pile" of fragments, which become her palette. "For instance, I am making a whole pile of special materials now, a palette that triggers a theme I want to investigate, but I will investigate it while I am in the process of creating it. I knew I wanted to do a series of temples based on Fire and Water and Earth, but I didn't know how they would shape themselves until I delved into the pile in front of me, all the multitude of fabric pieces and textures. And I pushed and pulled and cut and assembled until all the pieces of the puzzle fell into the perfect formation".

Monte and Amy collaborated on Goddess Guide Me: The Oracle That Questions of the Heart, published in 1992 by Simon & Schuster, with each of the twelve goddesses in lavish robes surrounded by symbol and scepter. Amy created each figure and hung them up in Monte's studio to inspire the text for the book. "We picked goddesses and broke them down into different archetypes. Then I would create the tapestries and Monte would illustrate my work with his words. Everything would always be right, the bird I chose or the flower. He would always see that the symbolism made sense even though I hadn't analyzed it, but more or less let it come through me". They worked the same way on The Enchanted Tarot in 1990 (St. Martin's Press). "It's a very balanced collaboration because I am a right brain and Monte is the left brain — female and male", says Amy.

At the core of their relationship is their interest in and concern for each other. Each wants for the other what the other wants for himself or herself. They have become so tuned into each other's presence that they are almost like to streams merging into one river. It is as difficult for those who know them to think of one without the other as it is for Amy and Monte to think of themselves without the other. As Monte says, "We are each other's best friend, lover, parent, and child".

Working together as artists, they have avoided the familiar pitfall of competing with each other. Instead, each tries to fulfill the role to which each is best suited — Amy as the creative artist, feeling her way among her materials to make her collages; Monte the writer, composing the narrative and adding insights to the works.

As a couple, they live within an organized and integrated family, where mutual caring and support resonates. To watch Amy's mother communications with her own mother, and then to watch the dynamics between Amy and her mother, is to see the power of the genetic chain. Each member of this family genuinely listens to the other, actually hears what each one is saying, and is able to react in full consciousness to the other's meaning.

In 1986, after some ten years of working with the encouragement of only her family, friends, and a few of her peers, Amy was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts grant in the painting category. She was the first artist working in fabric to be so awarded. It provided confirmation for the direction her art was taking.

In 1988, Monte's brilliant Karma Cards: A New Age Guide to Your Future Through Astrology, was published by Penguin Books to immediate international success. It was that work which led to The Enchanted Tarot in 1990, seventy-eight cards for which Amy made seventy-eight new fabric collages, especially created for the tarot deck. More than half a million people throughout the world have enjoyed developing their intuition by looking at reproductions of this tarot, asking questions of the cards, and reading the accompanying book.

Other such joint projects, with Amy doing the artwork, production, and manufacturing and Monte the writing, agenting, and promotion, include The Alchemist: The Oracle for Turning Your Life to Gold (1991, St. Martin's Press); Goddess Guide Me: The Oracle That Answers Questions of the Heart (1992, Simon & Schuster); and The Psychic Circle: The Magical Message Board (1993, Simon & Schuster).

Monte and Amy soon realized that the divination systems they created using their own spiritual and astrological convictions could be used to help and heal a large audience in need of clues, keys, and tools of empowerment in a confusing and overwhelming world. "When we started, we had no idea that we would be in the business of publishing and creating for others what we love best to do for ourselves", says Monte.

Amy's relationship with her mother Jesse, a strongly supportive presence as she was growing up, is illustrated by a story she tells. " My mother really always encouraged me to do my own thing and I always appreciated that. In fact, when we came to East Hampton and I started to go to school here, it was sort of a hippie time, in the late sixties. I was new and I wanted to make an impression. I wanted to paint my face with tattoo designs every morning; my mother helped me. Every morning I would get up an hour early and she would help me paint birds and flowers and stars on my face". Mother and daughter began their latest collaboration two years ago, producing a series of children's books with Charles E. Tuttle publishing: Zen ABC (1992), Scherazade's Cat (1993), and The Dream Quilt (1995).

Amy is a third-generation artist. She learned to paint literally at her grandfather's knee, where she recalls sitting at the age of three, filling in the green of leaves in the landscape he was working on. Amy's mother studied to be a painter and worked as a designer and illustrator. Amy grew up guided by family artists; she has never worked at anything other than art.

Her family moved to the tiny, idyllic farming town of LaPorte, Pennsylvania, with a population of 175 people, when Amy was five. "It was a perfect little town", she says. When she returned there for a visit two years ago, she found that nothing had changed. It was the same as it was when she was growing up there — still isolated by mountain ranges, still a forty-minute drive from movie theaters. The intimacy of her childhood community inspired her love of protected spaces, her love for enclosed gardens with birds and butterflies. "All that influence, as if from Persian miniatures, you see in my work, may well have come from my early environment", she says.

The traditional painting techniques she studied at Pratt Institute did not satisfy Amy's needs. She found herself developing her own methods and materials. She began finding inspiration in alternative sources — primitive and folk art, sacred images in the religious art of all cultures, and in tarot and alchemy. She was inspired, too, by child art and by people isolated from the mainstream of culture, people who were uncorrupted by schools, status, money, or power, for whom the will to art manifests itself as a pure drive out of the unconscious.

Amy's early work is characterized by the prevalence of a figure centered in the landscape and by areas of texture. Painted at first, the images increasingly came to be formed by textile insets. Her last straight painting, in 1973, before she turned exclusively to fabric was, prophetically, the painting of a patchwork quilt, even to the stitches. The gouache was created to illustrate a childhood fairy tale about a little boy and his quilt. He picked a different square of the quilt to go to each night — the land of the yellow square, the land of the blue square, and so on. She has since made the actual quilt out of fabric. This quilt was exhibited in one of Amy's gallery shows and is at the heart of The Dream Quilt, one of the children's books she collaborated on with her mother.

At the core of Amy's art is the dialogue between visual representation and abstraction. In a sense, as painting, it's all a question of abstraction. Yet that dialogue appears as an active, ongoing, fresh dynamic, resulting in a fusion of tight structure with a tension of energies between opposing weights and polarizing forces. Amy Zerner's goddesses, representing a real breakthrough in iconography, clearly celebrate the new balance she seems to have found between sight and insight, material and metaphor. On the other hand, she also still allows us to see the chaos of energies and choices which, conversely, generates the right move every time.

Her struggle for her art is both inspiring and exalting. She is unafraid to reach down into the deep blind unconscious within, for help in reaching new heights in the outside reality, in the material object. Mystery School, furthermore, spans the gamut from the geometric to the organic, with Amy's aspiring forms reaching upward, soaring in composition.

Artists today seem more excited about being heroes and heroines of art history than in being involved in the search for clues to the making of art. Amy seeks to go outside art history, creating the network of the now, and placing herself squarely in the spotlight of daily life, albeit with extraordinary objects possessing striking visual and tactile power. She has an ear for the oracle as well as a taste for habit and surprise, mode and myth.

At a time when our culture often appears to be irreparably isolated, one can see in Amy's work the unity art enjoyed in earlier ages and cultures. Art then was less jealous of its autonomy, and more willing to share its functions with religion and magic, more alive to the invocations of the spirit from which it originally spring forth.

Amy's work gives rise to the question: Is it art or is it craft? The fact is it is both. One of the most exciting aspects of her art is its fresh infusion of energy into the old arts/crafts dialogue and dilemma. Individual idiosyncrasy is in the work of the hand as much as in the hand itself.

Amy's textile world is a balance of art and craft. Art is identified with contemplation, with ideas, with the acts of wonder and mystery. Craft, which renders an object with consummate skill and material dexterity, incorporates use as an aesthetic. Craft is identified with domestic functions — tools, containers, furnishings for cooking, storage, eating, sitting, sleeping. At a time in American culture when the pressure to make art, to sell art, to buy art, to be art, has never been greater, Amy Zerner dares to create her own aesthetic of independence.

The essential difference between art and craft goes back to the very dawn of the human race when a genius of the species, perhaps hiding from an animal larger and fiercer than him/herself, decided he/she needed something more than strength and speed, something that would be the equivalent of the mountain peak touching the stars, the mobility of the snake on the ground, and the winged creatures of the Air. In the course of reaching beyond animal strengths and body skills, early man aspired to the powers of the spirit, the mysterious enlightenment that would give him or her the key to flight, safety, and serenity. In short, our early predecessor longed for the qualities Amy Zerner envisions and symbolizes in Paradise Found — the aspiration of the peak toward the stars, the wisdom in the Earth, the mystery in the coexistence of all forms.

Art was the beginning of de-animalization, of humanization and an intelligence separate from the physical body, for powers of the magical, the spiritual, and for a belief system that expressed needs beyond those of the body, beyond the animal. It was the beginning of the separation between body and mind, mind and spirit, body and soul, craft and art.

All art is visionary in its ability to see and reveal realms beyond and beneath the surface. In the silken strata of Paradise Found, we find ascension from Earth to Heaven and then again descent to Earth. It is the union of the powers of Heaven and Earth. At the core of Amy Zerner's vision, art and spirit are so inextricably bound to each other that they are the same. This is the ultimate revelation in Paradise Found. It is at the heart of all of Amy's work with the goddesses, the tarot, alchemy, mystic places, sacred spaces.

Amy Zerner, as artist and visionary, teaches us to extend the impossible, to enlarge ourselves beyond understanding, on a journey toward transformation. It is a self-perpetuating journey in a constant state of flux and discovery. In the end, the secret of the journey is that there is no end.